Tabla de contenidos para PEOPLE True Crime Stories: Cults en People

INSIDE THE SINISTER WORLD OF CRIMINAL CULTS Charismatic Leaders Who Use Mind Control SURVIVORS A Woman Who Escaped Charles Manson’s Murderous Family • Jim Jones’s Mass Suicide Cult • Sex Slavery PLUS Stories Behind TV Documentaries & Miniseries…

IN 2007 AMY CARLSON—a Kansas mom moving her way up the McDonald’s ladder—left her family to search for something bigger. By 2021 she was the self-proclaimed guru and “prime source creator” Mother God—leader of a quasi-religious group she’d dubbed Love Has Won—whose bright-blue mummified body was eventually discovered in a Denver home strung up in Christmas lights. In an arrest affidavit previously obtained by People, local law enforcement said they were tipped off to the corpse by Miguel Lamboy; authorities believed he was a member of the sect, about which the sheriff’s department said it had received complaints from families around the country claiming “the group is brainwashing people and stealing their money.” Lamboy told investigators that five members of the group had asked to stay at his place…

WITH THEIR ROLLED-UP NEWSPAPERS, umbrellas and ubiquitous-in-Japan flu-season face masks, the five men looked like ordinary commuters when they boarded subway cars on five different lines of the massive Tokyo metro system at the height of the March 20, 1995, Monday morning rush hour. But the men, members of the Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth) doomsday cult, carried packets containing nearly a quart of liquid sarin, a lethal nerve agent, inside their newspapers. The metal tips of their umbrellas were filed to knife points. As the crowded trains pulled into stations where accomplices waited outside in getaway cars, the men dropped their newspapers on the floor at the feet of their fellow passengers. They then used the umbrellas to stab holes in the parcels inside and exited the trains before the…

INVESTIGATORS HAD TO HACK THROUGH thickets of thornbushes and spindly trees across 800 acres in late April 2023 to reach the hundreds of shallow, unmarked graves in Kenya’s Shakahola Forest. As they worked, Hussein Khalid of the rights organization Haki Africa stood in the scorching sun and watched the forensic crews in white jumpsuits dig in the powdery red dirt to retrieve the corpses of children, women and men, telling the BBC, “The stench is unbearable.” The remains belonged to members of Pastor Paul Nthenge Mackenzie’s Good News International Ministries, many of whom had starved themselves to death after he reportedly convinced them at the start of 2023 that they needed to stop eating to prepare for the end of the world, sacrificing themselves like Jesus so they could reach…

Cults and cultlike groups have an undeniable mystique, exerting a strange power over not only their members but the wider public. Whether merely zealous, criminal or even murderous, cults also provide constant fodder for popular culture: 2023 saw a Hulu documentary on the sex cult that preyed on Sarah Lawrence College students, and an HBO film on the bizarre religious cult called Love Has Won. In recent years Paramount Network aired Waco, a dramatized account of the Branch Davidian sect, whose leader, David Koresh, and 74 devotees met a fiery end after a 51-day standoff with federal agents in 1993, sparking a cottage industry of right-wing conspiracy theories; SundanceTV’s Jonestown told the story of Peoples Temple cult leader Jim Jones, who in Guyana in 1978 led more than 900…

IT WAS A BUSY MORNING at Naifeh’s Deli and Grill in Cushing, Okla., on June 7, 2022. Waitress Holly Marie, a 42-year-old mother of five, was putting the last batch of cookies in the oven for a large take-out order when a detective and an official from the Texas attorney general’s Cold Case and Missing Persons Unit stopped by unannounced and asked to speak to her. As they all sat together in a booth, the officials said they were investigating the 1980s double murder of a young couple near Houston, Dean and Tina Clouse, who left behind a baby daughter who had been missing ever since. As Holly—who was adopted as an infant and raised by a Seventh-day Adventist pastor—listened in stunned silence, the investigators said they had reason to…

A REGISTERED DIETITIAN whose infamous hairdo seemed to soar toward the heavens, Gwen Shamblin founded the Weigh Down Workshop in 1986 by preaching weight loss as a way to serve the Lord. But as the waistlines of her congregants shrank, some former church members say, Shamblin’s abuses and exploitation—much like her signature coif—grew to gigantic proportions. “The basic principles were you can eat whatever you want. No foods are bad. Jesus declared all food clean,” Gina Wilson, a former member, explained in an episode of The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin, the 2021 HBO Max five-part documentary executive-produced by Chrissy Teigen. “What you did is you waited for physical hunger, and you ate till you are satisfied. And the times you weren’t hungry, you went…

SUCCEEDING—AND THRIVING—amid challenging circumstances was pretty common for Felicia Rosario. By 2010 the Bronx-born daughter of Dominican-immigrant parents had earned a degree in biochemistry from Harvard and a medical degree from Columbia. In her late 20s she was halfway through a rigorous forensic-psychiatry residency at a Los Angeles hospital, working toward her lifelong dream of becoming a doctor. But on a family visit, her younger brother Santos, then a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., introduced her to Lawrence “Larry” Ray, a shady businessman fresh out of prison for securities fraud who was crashing at his daughter’s dorm. Ray claimed to be a brilliant self-help guru who could heal past traumas. Felicia soon left her residency to join Ray and five college students, even as the “self-help” turned…

ONE DAY, WHEN Ruby Garnett was a 14-year-old girl sitting alone in a New York City beauty shop, a man walked in, looking as if he’d come from another world. He was dressed in white robes and smelled of sweet, exotic oils. To Ruby’s shock, he approached her and politely introduced himself. He was a member of a community called the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, he said, and he wanted to tell her about it. A few days later he took teen Ruby, without her mother, to see the community for herself. He led her down Bushwick Avenue, a run-down Brooklyn street. But as they arrived at the neighborhood where the Nuwaubians lived, “the whole scenery changed,” Garnett told People Magazine Investigates in 2018. The atmosphere, full of…

THE CHILD’S NAME WAS Pebbles—a petite, dark-eyed girl with flowing hair. She was 12 but looked younger, dressed up in her Sunday best, nervously waiting to meet with her pastor. Devoutly Christian, she held her pastor in the highest esteem, and the scene would have been a wholesome one—except that the meeting between Pebbles Rodriguez and Tony Alamo was about to take place in a federal prison. It was 1998, and Alamo, spiritual leader of the Alamo Christian Foundation, was serving time for tax evasion. It wasn’t his first stay behind bars, and it wouldn’t be his last, but nothing Alamo did seemed to dim the devotion of his hundreds of followers. He was over 60, with gray whiskers and receding hair, but Rodriguez had been raised to regard…

MORE THAN 300 YEARS after 20 innocent people were executed after the Salem witch trials, a 29-year-old preacher in upstate Chadwicks, N.Y., announced to her flock that one of its members was practicing witchcraft. History was about to repeat itself—and an innocent life would be taken. The Word of Life Christian Church had started out innocently enough as a Bible study group that met in people’s homes. The stocky, bearded founding minister who conducted the sessions was Jerry Irwin, a man described as “soft-spoken” but strict in his fundamentalist approach to Christian faith. “It started off as a good church,” says one former member, Nathan Ames. When Irwin left for a time to take over another church, the fellowship grew, as other pastors, and even a rabbi, were invited to…

PATRICK MARTION BELIEVED he had to prepare for the eventual collapse of society and in 2009 established the 22-acre Garden in Lafayette, Tenn., a place that touts itself as “an egalitarian, alternative, leaderless (leaderful) community.” Residents grow food, share work, have composting toilets and live in recycled buses. Hoping to let others know of what they view as Eden, in 2021 they invited via TikTok the curious to visit: “You are welcome to come at any time. Leave at any time.” Some took the Garden up on the offer. Others, though, particularly on social media, branded it a cultish cabal whose members regularly went naked, dined on a cat and used its fur to make a hat—all of which the Garden has denied. Facing threats, the Garden pulled up…